I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

I’m fine with this. Heck, ‘let the states decide’ is my go-to answer for these issues. We shouldn’t always test stuff in the states before we pass laws on the federal level, but it should be our default strategy.

In an one-on-one interview Saturday with The Denver Post, [Texas senator Ted Cruz] said he opposes legalization but declared that the U.S. Constitution allows “states to experiment.”

“I think on the question of marijuana legalization, we should leave it to the states,” Cruz said before addressing 6,000 GOP activists at the state GOP convention in Colorado Springs.”If it were me personally, voting on it in the state of Texas, I would vote against it.

“The people of Colorado have made a different decision. I respect that decision,” he continued. “And actually, it is an opportunity for the rest of the country to see what happens here in Colorado, what happens in Washington state, see the states implement the policies, and if it works well, other states may choose to follow. If it doesn’t work well other states may choose not to follow.”

By the way, I understand that there is a big argument out there about how safe marijuana is, really. So I’m not going to tell anybody that they’re wrong for opposing CO/WA’s laws. I’m just a guy who defaults to federalism on a lot of stuff.

Moe Lane

[UPDATE]: Must have highlighted/deleted some text. Anyway, H/T: @sahilkapur.

Found here. Short version: Darryl Glenn is the dude who put himself in a pretty good position to win the Republican nomination for Colorado Senator. Never underestimate the power of a good stump speech at just the right moment.

Ted Cruz should clean up in the remaining delegate races in Colorado; he’s almost certainly going to win the state at this point, and might very well sweep. Michigan is more of a ‘deciding who gets to be a pledged delegate’ situation. The general vibe there is that the state Republican party is staying neutral in the delegate allocation wars and just trying to match up delegates with the candidates they support, and that’s their call. For that matter: that’s actually helpful, on a second ballot. Which is why you probably haven’t heard anything about Michigan this weekend, I suspect.

This means that Calandra Vargas will face off Doug Lamborn in the June primary, and be at the top of the list. CO-05 is R+15, so even if there’s a disaster on the Presidential ticket after all the winner of this primary should still be OK. A buddy of mine was at the CO-05 thing, and he told me that Vargas sounded smart and passionate, and spoke well – and is apparently not affiliated with Trump, which would have been a deal-breaker right there. So keep an eye on this race.

That’s what I call it. “The marijuana.” Because of course it’s site policy never to imply ownership, in the event of marijuana. So I always use the indefinite article ‘the’ marijuana, never ‘your’ marijuana*.

But, yeah: somebody let the bear get toasted. Which is to be expected, of course. Colorado, you know.

The poll in question is mostly about pot legalization – which is a subject that the Democrats can’t quite capitalize on, given that Barack Obama and Joe Biden are strongly in favor of the War on Some Drugs – but not entirely. There’s also some polling of the Colorado Senate race. And… oh, boy: “In an early look at the 2016 U.S. Senate race in Colorado, U.S. Rep. Michael Coffman, a Republican, runs better than his wife, State Attorney General Cynthia Coffman, against Democratic incumbent U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet. Matchups show: Michael Coffman gets 43 percent to Bennet’s 40 percent. Bennet leads Cynthia Coffman 44 – 36 percent.” (more…)

Come, I will reveal to you a mystery: both side’s base voters are convinced that their party is the Stupid one. And here is another mystery: both side’s base voters are right. Case in point: the Colorado Democratic party. “The Democratic Party in the crucial presidential state of Colorado dissolved into bitter infighting Friday over a combination of obscure party rules and allegations that the party’s leader has ignored women and Latinos within the party.” Just in time for the 2016 election cycle! Thanks, guys!

The actual dispute is arcane; but then, it’s just a smokescreen for the real dispute, which is… a rationalization for the actual problem, which is that a sufficiently large portion of the Democratic party of Colorado loathes another sufficiently large portion of the Democratic party of Colorado. Which means that it’s time for the knives to come out. And the Democratic party of Colorado will thus spend several months punching itself in the face, because that’s apparently what you do when you lose elections that you were told that you were going to win.

I mention all of this not to reassure you that we’re better than that, over in the GOP. Obviously, we’re not. But neither are we particularly worse than that, either. Both parties seem bound and determined to not let the other one win the Who’s The Biggest Idiot? contest…

Hey, John Hickenlooper is the governor and it’s his state agency that’s doing the crackdown on yoga certification*. Or should it be shakedown? – Because there’s apparently money in regulating this.

Teacher-training programs that are required to be certified must pay fees to the state. The state charges $1,750 for an initial provisional certificate that is good for up to two years, then $1,500 for a renewable certificate good for three years. It also charges $175 for every “agent” authorized to enter into a contract with a student, plus $3.75 per student per quarter. In addition, schools that have been certified must secure a minimum bond of $5,000, which is based on the amount of tuition collected.

You gotta wonder what the victory condition for Colorado is for this one. I mean, liberals like yoga, right? And Hickenlooper’s a liberal. You’d think that he’d do the smart thing and take this as an opportunity to get rid of a stupid set of regulations… and, yes, this is stupid. A remarkable amount of our licensing regime is based on the twin engines of stupidity and laziness: people write a quick regulation instead of making a specific, circumstances-based decision; and then other people expand that regulation to cover something that it had no business covering. Happens. All the. Time.

So good job, Gov. Hickenlooper. You keep finding those enemies of the State! …As I said: he’s the governor. Fish rots from the head down, and all that.